Software AG bundles Cognos 8 reporting
Published:06-November-2007
By BR staff writer
Headlining the announcements to be made at Software AG's annual Integration World conference, it is announcing a new OEM deal with Cognos which will fuse BI (business intelligence) with BAM (business activity monitoring) and BPM (business process management).
Software AG will embed Cognos 8 as the reporting and analysis module of webMethods Suite. The obvious goal is converging the historical analyses of BI reporting with the real-time or near real-time scorecarding of BAM dashboards.
Ultimately, integration will be at metadata level, so analytics become first class citizens in s SOA registry and repository so that analytics can be associated with business processes or services.
"This began a year ago when we conducted a gap analysis of our platform," explained Matt Quinn, who directs product management for BPM, composite applications, and BAM for webMethods. "We realized that we did not have a great end to end reporting strategy."
There were technology synergies in that Cognos already exposed its reporting and access to star schemas as web services. In turn, webMethods keeps its BAM key performance indicators and related variables such as performance metrics in star schemas that proved compatible with Cognos' data structures. With webMethods BAM, each KPI creates a new table in the star, and with Cognos reporting and analytics embedded, the creation of those KPI tables could now be automated.
Besides Cognos, last week we reported that Software AG and Layer 7 pre-announced their new alliance, where Software AG would resell Layer 7 XML security appliances along with its CentraSite Governance Edition offerings.
Additionally, Software AG announced that Progress Software's Actional run-time SOA governance offering has become a member of the CentraSite community, Software AG's SOA alliance program.
Our View
The near-term benefits are that you can get the current and historic views of a business process without having to switch panes. But in the long run we could see some other possibilities that could pop, when you converge BI onto a common platform, with metadata integration with BAM and BPM.
Eventually this could lead to a closed-loop scenario where thresholds that are specified for exception reporting could evolve into policies that are embedded in process metadata, which in turn could trigger refinement of business processes where certain conditions materialize.
With rivals such as IBM and Oracle also having collected BI assets as part of their greater software platforms, which also include BPM and BAM, Software AG's tie-in with Cognos (for now, the last major independent BI vendor, unless you're counting Information Builders) was an important pre-emptive move.
